things they say about you after you're dead

Steve is not the first Champaign cohort to pass to the other side of that curtain.  At that July 4th party that I would always drop by Steve's house before attending there is often a group photo.  The crowd is a little smaller every year.  A lot of people have lost interest or moved away but I can run my finger across the photos and mutter this one is gone, and this one, and that one.  Sometimes I remember a story about Champaign and realize that everybody involved in it is dead except me.

I imagine solitary deaths like Steve's are commonplace.  If you live alone and have some sudden event like a heart attack or a stroke that is what will happen.  If we don't go into the hospital likely it is what awaits Old Dog and myself.  Not so bad considering that many people in hospitals want to go home to die.  Unfortunate for the guys whose job it is too haul us away, but I imagine they get used to it.

Steve had a sister who lives here in the city,  He came up every year for Christmas, just a day or two but I imagine that was his family ties.  Last I heard she was dealing with the details.  I knew her a little, enough to know that she didn't think much of me, and that's why I haven't tried to get in touch with her for details like what was the actual cause, where in the house did they find him, what became of the body.  Well none of those things mean anything really.

Right after you die that's what everybody wants to know, your death becomes the most important thing about you, but that soon passes and then everybody has nice thoughts of you, which is nice but a little unnatural like putting rouge on a corpse and eventually that passes on into a fuller description, none of us is all sinner or all saint. 

I felt a little bad writing Steve's story that I didn't have enough nice things to say about him, but you know that's the way things are, he had his faults but he was my friend.


I don't get this it gets better,  it never gets better thing.  I guess if you are a kid and in a bad place things will likely get better, and maybe it is the sort of thing that you would tell a kid to raise their spirits, but I don't know, sometimes things get better and sometimes they get worse.  I did like that movie, it was recommended to me by Old Dog.


I had a friend who also flunked out of Airborne.  He used to chant I want to be an airborne ranger. I want to live a life of danger.  Danger, never appealed to me.